Touch Tone Delivery

Touch messages are messages sent by calling a pager's phone number and sending a series of tones (like a touch tone phone) as a message.  The tones are converted to their equivalent numbers and sent to the recipient's pager.  Some paging carriers do not accept messages for numeric pagers via the regular TAP (IXO/PET) protocol.  They only accept touch-tone numeric messages.  NotePager Pro  supports delivering numeric messages in this manner, but it is not the preferred method.  This method of message delivery has no provisions for error detection/correction or message confirmation.  It is sometimes known as 'blind dialing' because there is no way to really know if the other end actually received the message.

How to setup a recipient for touch-tone messages:

First a 'Tone' carrier must be setup.  Only a single 'Tone' carrier may be needed to send message to all your numeric pagers.  To make a carrier a 'Tone' carrier, choose 'Tone' as the 'Delivery Method' on the carrier setup screen.  The default wait string ',,@' should work for most pagers.  If you need to use different wait string for different pagers, you will need to create multiple 'Tone' carriers (one for each unique wait string needed).  The wait string can be changed to support pagers with different input methods.

The comma (,) is used to pause (about one second)

The at sign (@) is used to wait for silence (about five seconds of silence)

The default wait string will dial the pager's number, pause for a couple of seconds, and then wait for a five second period of silence (after the beeps or greeting message) and then send the message (touch tones).

To setup a recipient to use touch-tone delivery, simply choose the carrier you just setup as a 'Tone' carrier and put the numeric pager's phone number in the 'Phone Num' field on the recipient setup screen.  If you have setup several carriers with different wait strings, choose the carrier that will work with this pager's service provider.  With this setup, NotePager Pro will dial the phone number setup in the recipient's 'Phone Num' field, pause according to the commas or @ in the carrier's 'Wait String' field, and then send the touch-tone message.

Some paging providers use a common phone number for all numeric pagers.  The user must dial this number, wait for a tone, dial their pager's ID number, wait for another message, and then type the numeric message.  This can be accomplished in NotePager Pro by setting the 'Tone' carrier's wait string to wait a predetermined amount of time (using commas and or an @ symbol).  This would  be the wait time between sending the pager's phone number and sending the actual touch-tone message.  On the recipient setup screen, in the recipient's 'Phone Num' field, put the paging company's common phone number followed by a few commas or an @ symbol, and then the pager's phone number.  This will give the following results:  The phone number will be dialed from the first part of the recipient's ID/PIN field,  NotePager Pro will pause according to the commas or @ in the 'Phone Num' field, NotePager Pro will then send the second set of number in the recipient's 'Phone Num' field and then pause according to the carrier's wait field.  NotePager Pro will then send the touch-tone message.